WoW gets a lot of hate from eSports purists. I think a lot of this is derived from a lack of knowledge about the game, but a portion of the criticism is very true. There exist numerous aspects to WoW PvP that reduce the influence reaction time, overview of the game and overall knowledge of every class has on an arena match. Those have been extensively covered on sites like Gameriot and AJ so I won’t bother going through them in a one-off blog. What has to be said is even despite those flaws, PvP in WoW especially on the tourney scene is incredibly exciting to watch when you have a solid understanding of the game. For that I suggest you give the game a go for yourself.

For now though I’ll try to explain the very basics of PvP in World of Warcraft so that next time you’re able to catch some action on ESL’s live video service or xfire’s player streaming service you’ll know what to look out for and the jargon used by commentators like 2GD and Zalmah won’t sound so surreal.

The Format

Right now (and hopefully for a long time to come), tournaments use the deathmatch system to pit teams of 3 against each other. The games aren’t continuous in that once a player dies it’s usually game over for their team, on very rare occasions certain classes (Druid, Shaman, Priest, Paladin) can actually cast a resurrection spell which will revive them. Generally these spells take a long time to cast and require you to be out of combat (a player is normally in combat when they interact with an enemy player) which means they are difficult to pull off when the situation has become a 2on3. So the first team to lose a player will normally lose the arena match, games where players are revived are the equivalent of 1on5s in CS.

The ‘Trinket’

When commentators refer to a player ‘trinketing’ something, this means that they’ve used their Medallion of the Horde/Alliance to remove a spell cast on them by an enemy player which has caused them to lose control of their character or impair their movement (stuns, crowd control etc). This is important to watch out for as every player has some form of the Medallion and it can only be used every 2 minutes, if the enemy team can force you to ‘trinket’ this leaves you vulnerable to a target swap which you would no longer be able to avoid through your own means.

Classes and their Roles

There are 10 types of characters in WoW, each type is called a class. I’ll try to summarise their roles as simply as I can, keep in mind every class can play differently by ‘speccing’ their character a certain way (in which case I’ll focus on the spec most commonly used in tournaments).

Rogue: Rogues are damage dealers. They cannot heal teammates and their role constitutes mostly doing a lot of damage in a short space of time. They can prevent enemy players from doing anything by using stuns which immobilise their target.

Paladin: You’ll see two types in tournament play. Holy paladins are incredibly powerful healers with few offensive abilities. Retribution Paladins (normally called Retadins) are damage dealers with defensive capabilities. A spell to watch out for is Hand of Protection which grants a teammate immunity from physical damage for 10 seconds at a cost of that player being unable to do physical damage themselves. The upside to this is that casters (damage dealers who do magical damage as opposed to physical) can continue to cast spells while affected by Hand of Protection.

Priest: Discipline priests have a wide variety of both offensive and defensive abilities in addition to being the only class which can dispel (remove magic) enemy players and teammates (in which case they can remove important abilities like Hand of Protection from opposing players as well as remove magical spells cast on their own players).

I’ll finish off the rest of the classes in my next blog. Rogues, make sure you check out Pheq’s Rogue Macro Tutorial video.